Declarative APIs in an Imperative World
Declarative UI frameworks have taken over the JavaScript landscape. Which is great, because making assumptions about your application's state is a source of pain, frustration, and bugs. But what happens when you need to glue together imperative APIs with your declarative UI framework?
In this talk, I'll explain some problems the Atom Editor team came across when we started using React as our UI framework, as well as the solutions we came up with. Together, we'll explore how to generalize these patterns to tackle other imperative APIs you might come across in the wild, such as animation libraries. Finally, I'll explore the relationship between declarative UIs and functional programming, why functional programming has risen in popularity, and how we can learn from the history of programming language trends over time to avoid making the same mistakes over and over.
Academic level: Intermediate
What is the take away in this talk: How to use imperative APIs
